


Et In Arcadia Ego

by wolfy_writing



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2014-11-09
Packaged: 2018-02-24 17:31:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2590145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfy_writing/pseuds/wolfy_writing





	Et In Arcadia Ego

It wasn’t one of the biggest battle in the Time War.

It wasn’t even the Doctor’s biggest battle to date, but Arcadia still sticks in his mind. He has a peculiar kind of luck that haunts him like a curse, and in Arcadia it manifest.

He wasn’t supposed to be there at all. He’d gone to New Rayong, a human colony world that was due to vanish, destabilizing the local military, and leaving a key Time Lord flank exposed. Humans weren’t directly involved in the Time War, or even aware that it existed, but they were used by both sides. More than a few ‘accidents’ occurred in strategic patterns you’d have to map into at least five dimensions to see.

He’d been chosen to lead the team for a number of reasons; familiarity with the native species, good field knowledge of Dalek time travel tech, a high success record on unusual missions, and he suspected, because Romana was being kind. There were benefits to being an old friend of the President, even if he didn’t ask for them.

She knew him so well. She knew he liked saving lives better than killing. He suspected that she knew how much he hated being in battles at all. She knew he did better in the company of humans; she even knew why. She knew he couldn’t stay out of the war. So when he got assignments like this, he wondered. Just a bit.

They sent him along with four raw recruits. Children, really. The oldest was barely a hundred years old. At their age, he’d been studying paradox equations and sneaking out to drink with Shebogans at night.

Still, there were worse places to be in this war. They considered themselves lucky to be serving under him. He had a reputation for bringing his comrades back alive.

Until this mission, that is. Until Arcadia.

He made a mistake. He cut the timing too fine. Didn’t want to give the Daleks time to spot them. If they saw the Time Lord interference, they could set up a counter-mission of their own. And that would risk warping the timeline beyond repair.

This had happened a lot in the early days of the war. They’d had to loop entire planets out of existence to keep the universe whole. The Time Lords had learned to be more cautious. The Daleks didn’t seem to care.

So he’d cut it fine, and arrived a day before the planet was due to go. The Daleks, it turned out, were already out in force. They’d taken the planet easily, and were holding the colonists. Select ones got taken to the ship for unspecified purposes, while the rest were just left unharmed. Provided they didn’t resist.

He’d left one of his soldiers, a skinny bright lad who called himself Pex, to stay behind on the planet and call for reinforcements. He took the others and infiltrated the ships posing as human prisoners. They were under strict orders to activate their Time Rings at the first sign of danger.

This was after the Daleks had learned how to jam the signal on a Time Rings, but before anyone on Gallifrey knew that.

Along with eleven million humans, Pex had died the next day, when the planet had boiled away into space, leaving only a dust-cloud wrapped around the sun. At least he’d died quickly, in less than a minute. The others hadn’t been anywhere near so lucky.

The Daleks had a research facility on a world they called New Skaro. There were a lot of New Skaros. The Doctor wasn’t sure if it was defiance or a simple lack of imagination. This one had been called Haven, once upon a time. It had been founded by refugees as a sanctuary for political radicals and the unwanted of all sorts. It had lasted seven centuries, which wasn’t much in the scale of galactic history, but quite good for idealists. Then the Daleks came.

He’d been picked out, of course, along with the other three. They were questioned unsuccessfully. He was the only one who knew anything of strategic significance, and he was quite good at playing dumb. He also got lucky. None of the others called him Doctor.

Mesol, a girl he’d pegged as rather shy, had been shot while trying to escape. She’d regenerated, and been strapped down to a medical scanner so the Daleks could measure the regenerative process. Over and over again. They killed her in different ways; blasts, poisons, stab wounds, and asphyxiation, and they monitored the changes in how she regenerated.

She’d been on her first new body when they started with a similar blast, and on her eighth, eleven hours later, when they cut out her hearts. She was awake for that, and screaming.

That didn’t kill her though. She regenerated again. He never did find out how she died.

Vel died faster. The Daleks, with typically excessive efficiency, decided to test the results of burning. They used a high-heat incineration chamber. There wasn’t enough left of him to regenerate.

Aldis and the Doctor were used to test the offensive capacity of experimental temporal manipulators. These were devices that could reverse or accelerate the aging of a living organism. Careful focus allowed it be trained on select body parts, resulting in a single finger aging centuries, or one eye being sent back to infancy. It had been tested on humans, but between their short lifespans and their susceptibility to shock, they died too quickly to be of use.

Time Lords could survive a great deal. Aldis went mad fairly quickly, but they both survived.

A rescue mission arrived eventually. They’d been chasing after Pex’s signal since New Rayong was destroyed. A Dalek weapons research base was a big enough prize to merit a good sized strike force, and the Doctor and Aldis were dragged out alive.

Aldis died en route to Arcadia. The medic on duty had tried to force a regeneration. He’d taken one look at Aldis, the horribly mismatched body parts, wrinkled ancient fingers, twisted baby feet, straw blond hair streaked with white, and that pinpoint fetal eye, and he'd written the body off. Aldis was placed in a regeneration stimulation chamber, still shaking with asynchronic convulsion and the device was switched on.

He didn’t make it. His bio-temporal system was in shambles, and forced regeneration made it worse. Halfway through, the boy gave a final moan and just dissolved.

The Doctor was in better shape. Not much better, but enough. When they’d tried to force him into the chamber, he’d grabbed the wall and screamed.

He hadn’t actually been thinking. It was pure panic. He’d had a hard time telling what century it was, and when they tried to put him in the chamber he thought he was being forcibly regenerated again. So he reached out with his good hand and hung on for dear life.

They’d slapped a neural wave feeder on his head to sedate him, and were about to load him in when Aldis dissolved and the technician shouted, “Stop!”

Right in the nick of time. Just his luck.

\----------

He was on Arcadia for several weeks after that, mostly because they expected him to die. If his injuries had been considered survivable, and if they’d had any idea what to do for him, he’d have been dragged back to Gallifrey, and subjected to intensive treatment to get him back on his feet and into the war effort. But as things stood, he was made comfortable and left to die.

He survived, of course. He’s always been good at that.

Temporal anomalies within the body wreak havoc on the autonomic systems, but they can be compensated for. Time can be shifted from one part to another, averaging out the irregularities. A bit like balancing an equation. The secret is to readjust slowly, and avoid succumbing to shock.

The first week, he focused on the major organ systems. Getting his hearts synced up properly simplified the process and made him a lot more comfortable. After that were the limbs, which were tricky. Restructuring bone mass always hurts. Then the sensory organs and facial features. Within a month he was able to get out of bed and walk around. At the end of six weeks the medics pronounced him fit.

“Well, this is unexpected.” The medic raised an eyebrow. “Full recovery, except for the hair.” He glanced at the gray streaks adorning the Doctor’s brown curls. “I’m guessing that will grow out.” He pulled out an artron chronometer and aimed it at the Doctor’s head.

“Interesting. How old were you?”

“It’s hard to track birthdays when you hop around like I do, but nearly twelve hundred. Why?”

The medic fiddled with a dial. “According to this, you’re eight hundred and sixty-five. Interesting. It looks like a side effect. A harmless one. I’d recommend a couple weeks rest to monitor for any complications. But you seem fine. You’re very lucky, you know.”

\----------

There was a base on Arcadia, hidden exceptionally well. It didn’t interface directly with reality at all. The inside was spacious, with a burnt-orange illusory sky to match Gallifrey’s. The outside was a bare field that could be walked through without ever knowing the base was there. He did that once, as soon as he was back on his feet, just to see what it was like.

Then the Dalek fleet arrived.

It wasn’t because of him they came. Not exactly. The Daleks arrived because the Time Lords had taken the research base. The Time Lords had taken the research base because Pex’s signal led them there. Pex gave the signal on his orders.

So, sort of his fault, yes.

He hadn’t seen the fleet arrive, under the fake orange sky. He’d been watching hologrammatic birds when the alert sounded. The soldiers all went to battle stations. He’d been sent back to the infirmary to wait.

That hadn’t lasted long. He’d been itchy and restless and managed to talk his way into the command center. He even helped a bit, when they needed someone to rewire to quantum fields to something that would actually stop the latest model Dalek ship.

His luck again. He only bought the base about ten minutes in a battle that was over in an hour and a half; the defenses still fell. But because he’d been in the war room instead of the infirmary, he was closest when the base commander finished the archive dump. That meant he had the data tube pressed into his hand, and was told, “Take this back to Gallifrey. Go!”

He’d grabbed the tube and ran. It contained every bit of useful information in the base records, stored in a glass tube the size of a pen. Standing orders were to prioritize it in the evacuation of any base. And if Gallifrey didn’t learn that Daleks could jam Time Rings, lives would be lost.

So he’d taken the tube, and the first emergency pod he could find, and left. Others would follow, he though. He was wrong, as it turned out.

The pod was close enough to be rocked by the blast when the Daleks blew up the sun.

It would go down, briefly, in the history of the Time War. Four thousand Time Lords, and eleven billion other sentients wiped out in a single attack. The first successful use of stellar manipulation weaponry by the Dalek fleet. And one lone pod escaping, with the sole survivor stumbling out to place vital military intelligence in the President’s hand.

Romana had threatened to pin a medal on him. In public.

But Arcadia haunts him still. It isn’t the nagging feeling of cowardice, although there is that. He fought his share of front line battles before, and afterwards far more than his share. The guilt over running while everyone else dies doesn’t go away, no matter how much he knows rationally that it wasn’t like that. It does fade, however, becomes background noise. Something he can live with. Something that he can put out of his mind.

The thing about Arcadia that he can’t forget, is his luck. His thrice-damned luck. New Rayong was vaporized and he walked away unscathed. He was the only prisoner rescued on Haven to survive. And from Arcadia, there was nothing left but him.

He doesn’t want to die; even after everything in the war, he doesn’t want that. He just wants to know he can.

But there is something in the universe, or possible something in him, that can carry him alive through anything, it seems. Luck is the best word for it he can think of. It’s not cowardice or courage, and it’s not all skill. It’s definitely not wisdom. It may possibly be fate.

World after world after world can burn up, and he walks away. On some of the longer nights, he wonders how long he can keep this up. On some of the bleaker nights, he wonders how much destruction he can see before he goes mad.


End file.
